Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Saylor
My alarm goes off just before six, and my hand’s on it before the second beep.
Not because I'm a morning person.
Because the walls in this apartment are thin enough to hear my neighbor's cat sneeze, and the last time my alarm ran for more than ten seconds, the woman in 4B left a note on my door about respecting shared spaces.
The note was unsigned, but I know her handwriting. I know everyone's handwriting in this building.
When your name is a loaded weapon, you learn to pay attention to small details.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed.
The floor is cold.
February in Morgantown means the landlord is controlling all of our thermostats. He's cheap. He keeps it cold enough that my toes could freeze.
My apartment is small.
A studio, technically, though the listing called it a one-bedroom because someone hung a curtain rod between the kitchen and the sleeping area.
Everything in it is mine. Paid for with tips, budgeting, and a stubbornness my mother tells me I inherited.
The bed gets made before the coffee brews. The dishes get washed before I walk out the door.
Every surface is clean, every corner accounted for, because if the apartment stays in order, I can pretend the rest of my life is too.
Coffee first. Black, because creamer costs four dollars, and I'd rather put four dollars toward the electric bill.
I drink it standing at the counter, looking out the window at the parking lot below.
A guy in the building across the way is scraping frost off his windshield.
A girl in a WVU hoodie is walking a dog so small it looks like a slipper with legs.
Normal morning. Normal people doing normal things in a normal town.
Shower. Get dressed. Jeans, boots, a flannel over a tank top because layering is the only honest response to West Virginia weather between September and April.
Hair up, no makeup except chapstick.
I don't spend time in front of mirrors. Never have. Mirrors ask you to look at yourself, and looking at yourself invites the question of what you see. What I see depends on the day and how generous I'm feeling toward the gene pool I crawled out of.
My phone buzzes on the counter. Mom.
I pick up before the second ring. "Morning."
Her voice is already warm, already caffeinated. "Morning, baby. You eat yet?"
I lean my hip against the counter. "I had coffee."
"Coffee is not food, Saylor." I can hear her moving around her kitchen, cabinet doors opening and closing.
"Coffee is a bean. Beans are food. Therefore, coffee is food."
She laughs. The sound is warm and unhurried, and hearing it loosens something between my shoulder blades I didn't realize was tight.
My mother's laugh is the safest sound in the world. It always has been.
Even during the trial, even during the worst of it, she'd find something to laugh about at the end of the day because she refused to let him take everything away from us.
"I'm making chili tonight." A pot clangs in the background. "Come over after your shift?"
I rinse my mug, wedging the phone between my ear and shoulder. "Can't. I close at the bar."
"Then come over after you close."
"Mom, it'll be one in the morning."
"And?" The word comes out with a shrug I can hear through the phone. "I'll be up. Bring your laundry."
I smile into the empty mug. "Fine. But I'm not staying over. I have a class at eight in the morning."
"Whatever you say, sweetheart." Her voice goes soft. Warm in a way only mothers manage.
She'll have the guest bed made, a glass of water on the nightstand, and I'll end up staying. We both know it.
This is how we operate. She offers more than I ask for. I pretend to resist.
Neither of us mentions why being in the same house matters, why the sound of someone else breathing in the next room is a kind of medicine no pharmacy stocks.
We talk for another few minutes. Her job at the dentist's office, a funny story about a patient who fainted during a cleaning.
My statistics exam next week, whether the landlord is ever going to stop being a cheap asshole.
We keep it on the surface, and we're both fine with it.
Some conversations are better over coffee at her kitchen table, not through a phone speaker while I'm standing at my counter at six in the morning.
She doesn't mention him, and I don't either.
"Love you, Mom." I set the mug in the drying rack.
"Love you more." A pause, then firmer: "Eat something real."
I hang up and grab my bag and keys and lock the door behind me. Even test the knob twice.
Not because I'm paranoid.
Because I watched my mother check the locks on our house every night for years straight after the divorce, and some habits root themselves in you before you're old enough to understand why.
Campus is a twelve-minute walk from my apartment.
I could drive, but a parking permit runs four hundred dollars a year, and I'd rather eat.
Besides, the walk gives me twelve minutes to put my face on.
The public version. Head down, shoulders relaxed, face neutral.
Not unfriendly. Not inviting.
The human equivalent of beige. Forgettable by design.
Morgantown is a small enough city and a big enough college town to offer a strange kind of anonymity most of the time.
Fifty thousand people when school is in session, half of them undergrads who cycle out every four years and don't know local history beyond which bars have dollar drafts on weekdays.
I can walk through campus and be nobody. A face in the crowd. Saylor Bell, senior social work major, unremarkable.
Most of the time.
The Starbucks line inside the Mountainlair is fifteen people deep, which means I'm standing in one place long enough to be noticed.
I don't usually come here. Too crowded, too exposed.
But my thermos is leaking from the lid and I need caffeine to survive Dr. Petrov's statistics lecture, so here I am.
The barista calls my name. "Saylor?"
I step forward to grab the cup and catch the eyes of the woman behind me. Mid-forties, WVU staff lanyard.
Her gaze moves from my face to the name on the cup and back.
The calculation is instant.
I can see it happening behind her eyes, the scroll through memory, the connection snapping into place.
She knows.
Not because I'm famous.
Because Morgantown has a long memory, and the name Halstead was front-page news in this town for nearly a year.
Some people still remember the face of the girl who sat in the courtroom every day behind a woman who used to love a monster.
I changed my name. Changed everything I could change.
But you can't change bone structure, and my father's cheekbones sit on my face whether I want them there or not.
The woman doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to.
The half-step back says it. The way her hand tightens on her purse strap says it.
I take my coffee and walk out. My face stays neutral. My hands stay steady around the cup. It doesn't sting anymore, but it used to.
When I was fifteen and kids at school whispered behind my back.
When I was seventeen, a boy I'd been dating for two months broke up with me in the cafeteria because his mother told him to, because of who my father was.
When I was nineteen and my psychology professor pulled me aside after class and asked if I was "coping okay" with a tone soaked in pity and morbid curiosity.
And lastly, a few weeks ago, when a girl at a party recognized me and announced it to the room like she'd spotted a celebrity, except the celebrity was a murderer and I was his fucking souvenir.
It used to sting. Now it's a weather pattern. Something you dress for and walk through without stopping.
My statistics class is in Armstrong Hall, second floor, room 224.
I take the stairs because the elevator in this building smells like old carpet and anxiety.
The classroom is half-full when I arrive. I sit where I always sit. Back row, end seat, closest to the door.
Not because I think I'll need to leave. Because having the exit at my shoulder makes the room feel bigger, and bigger rooms are easier for me to breathe in.
I pull out my laptop and open my notes.
Most of the seats around me are empty because the back row is where the students who don't want to be called on gather, and we've all silently agreed to give each other space.
A bag drops onto the desk one seat over.
I glance up.
Black hair. Brown eyes so dark they're almost the same color.
Swimmer's build, lean and angular.
A body built by actual movement, not a gym membership.
He's wearing a plain black jacket over some layers, with jeans and boots scuffed enough to have seen real dirt, not that fake fashion dirt they stain everything with these days.
No backpack, no laptop. A single notebook and a pen he clearly borrowed from someone because it's pink with a feather on the end.
He's been sitting near me for the last month. Not next to me. Near me.
One seat over, sometimes two.
He never stares. Never makes conversation beyond the bare minimum.
The first week, he asked what chapter the homework covered. The second week, he nodded at me when he sat down.
Last week, he said "nice notes" when he caught a glimpse of my screen, and I said "thanks", and we both went back to pretending the other person wasn't there.
I don't know his name. He doesn't know mine.
The space suits me. I've never been the type of woman who closes it.
He settles into his seat, flips the notebook open, and clicks the pink feather pen.
Dr. Petrov starts the lecture. Regression analysis.
I type. He writes. Forty-five minutes pass without either of us speaking.
Then Dr. Petrov puts a problem on the screen and tells us to work with someone nearby.
He turns to me, pen still in hand. "You get what she's asking for here? Because I'm looking at this and I see words, but they're not making sentences."
His voice is different from what I expected. Not a West Virginian accent.
Something flatter, faster. Northern. Maybe Midwest.
I look at the problem. "She wants us to identify the independent and dependent variables, then set up the regression equation."
He stares at the screen, stares at his notebook, and looks back at me with an expression so honestly lost it borders on comedic.